coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success,
or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen. - john le carre

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

"i'm agent ford and he's...uh...agent hamill."

working on the first few posts for the paper not included ebooks blog -- my second one accidentally turned into a 2-parter -- and reading frantically to figure out what happened to the ira between partition in the '20s and sean mcstiofain in the '60s didn't leave me with any brain left to come up with a post for this morning, but i do have a couple of things to throw out there.

1. gillian flynn's dark places. i tried. it looked like a promising kind of dark murder thriller and then just went boring by about chapter 4. the narrator was a compelling voice -- the grown-up survivor of the in cold blood-style murder of her family by her elder brother (she thinks) -- but it quickly became apparent, to me at least, that the only way i was going to be happy with the book was going to be if the narrator turned out to be the killer and flynn clearly wasn't going to take it in that direction. the writing was good; the voices of the characters very clear and distinct; but i was looking for something a little more twisted and this wasn't going to do it. sorry, ms. flynn.

2. supernatural. i've been drifting in and out of wanting to sit down and actually watch this show for quite a while; i keep channel-flipping through random episodes and, whenever i do, i tend to sit and watch the rest of the show which means i have a really weird view of what's going on. i then got put off the idea of netflixing the early seasons by the fact that every story i saw about the show for awhile referenced the fact that the two lead actors are really hot and therefore girls obviously loved the show. uh-huh. yeah, 'cause that's clearly the only-- oh, why bother. moving on.

two things -- technically three, i guess -- got me back into the idea of watching it again. one was the episode i flicked into last week which was a very clever self-parody featuring the two main characters, dean and sam winchester, being invited to a fan conference for themselves. supernatural has been turned into a popular book and comic series in their universe and guess what? they have fan boys. lots of them.

the second was a post on scifiwire -- has anyone else noticed that the wire has gone kinda weird since the sci-fi/syfy (shudder) rebranding? -- about the colt. now, i have no idea what this is meant to mean other than a prop colt pistol which probably has some uber-nifty demon-killing and/or spirit-banishing significance. but they happened to mention that the gun had only 13 bullets. :) this probably has absolutely nothing at all to do with david wellington's 13 bullets, but the mere possibility made me happy. and then, last but not least, there was a sale at best buy -- the first full season of the show was only $15.

so far, it's a not badly spent $15. i've watched the first eight episodes -- the first four back to back last saturday afternoon in a desperate attempt at decompressing after a stressful morning. i can say with some certainty that:a) i like their car:

and b) i like dean's jacket.

i think i'm going to start calling it dean's amazing indestructible self-cleaning jacket, in fact. and i'm hoping that the necklace he wears so prominently turns out to be important in some way. i'd take either important to the character or the actor.

it's funny that i watched the first episode or two thinking, 'wow, this really looks like it was filmed in x-files country' and then noticed that, in fact, john shiban is one of the writers/executive producers for the show. i used to have a better grip on who the various x-files writers were and whether they produced reasonably coherent shows -- within chris carter's somewhat...shall we say flexible universe rules -- or whether they just came out with incoherent crap. there are a couple of supernatural episodes that are veryx-files: "wendigo" and "skin" particularly. "skin" reminds me so much of an old x-files that i've been tempted to go back and figure out which one but, really, it's one of the weaker of the eight episodes i've seen, so i'm letting it just fade into distant memory.

if the show has an overarching weakness so far, it's that all the female character are the same. they're either motherly and null or teenaged, hot, and damaged. and they all wear too much lipgloss. i mean, really. every woman in this show is addicted to collagen lip injections and revlon gloss. but i have hope this will improve; i mean, you can't run a show for 5 seasons, keep a solid fanbase, and fairly good critical reception entirely with the same two guys in a car. no matter how good the leather is.